In America, Black Is Beautiful

Late in the day, as always, Larry King has discovered that “black is in.”

Speaking with Bob Woodward on “Larry King Live” Wednesday, King announced that his 8-year-old son Cannon wants to be black.

“There’s a lot of advantages to being black,” King said. “Black is in. Is this a turning of the tide?”

Black has been “in” for ages.

To plagiarize myself:

“The coolness of being black and the considerable leverage the identity affords those who cultivate it is why the likes of Halle Berry and Alicia Keys have chosen the identity of the parent who abandoned them over their devoted (liberal) white mothers who reared them. Berry, Keys, and Obama have embraced this politicized racial identity, because to do so is smart; because in America, black is beautiful. It also has its special privileges.”

For the same reason, Obama too chose “black” as a racial identity, despite having been abandoned by his black father and raised by his white, maternal grandparents. And despite being half white as well as an allegedly “post-racial” persona.

Updated: Uncivil Agenda

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Business, Gender, Individual Rights, Private Property, Race

One can only hope that the Obama Administration’s commitment to further curtail freedom of contract, speech, and religion; and the already severely delimited right to associate and dissociate at will–that these go the way of his tax hikes on those who’ve accrued more riches than others. (The update consists of links to the better perspective.)

Since my wish is not His command, please apprise yourselves of what’s ahead. Read through Obama’s “Civil Rights” program (I’ve posted half of it). I do, however, support his efforts to reduce drug-use prosecutions, but not through coerced “treatment”:

* Combat Employment Discrimination: President Obama and Vice President Biden will work to overturn the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that curtails racial minorities’ and women’s ability to challenge pay discrimination. They will also pass the Fair Pay Act, to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.
* Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: President Obama and Vice President Biden will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation, expand hate crimes protection by passing the Matthew Shepard Act, and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Section.
* End Deceptive Voting Practices: President Obama will sign into law his legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and full information so they can vote.
* End Racial Profiling: President Obama and Vice President Biden will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.
* Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support: President Obama and Vice President Biden will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama and Biden will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.
* Eliminate Sentencing Disparities: President Obama and Vice President Biden believe the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.
* Expand Use of Drug Courts: President Obama and Vice President Biden will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.

Read on.

Top Think Tanks

Education, Free Markets, Human Accomplishment

Congratulations to the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am proud to be affiliated, for being ranked among the world’s most influential think tanks.

The ranking report is titled “The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program.” Of interest (on page 12 of the PDF): The most thoughtful regions of the world, measured in the number of think tanks they produce, are north America and Western Europe. Unfortunately Africa tanks.

'A' For Al Jazeera

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Media, Middle East, South-Africa, The West, War

I’ve said it before: The Al Jazeera news network practices better journalism than its American cable counterparts. Al Jazeera is as partisan as the local cable cretins, however, it does know news–the art of reporting.

Writes Eric Calderwood, for the Boston Globe:

[I]n a larger sense, Al-Jazeera’s graphic response to CNN-style “bloodless war journalism” is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news – you could call it “blood journalism” – takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.

For an American, to watch Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza is to realize that you’ve become alienated not just from war, but even from the representation of war as a real thing. As Americans, we’re used to hearing the sound of heavy artillery, machine guns, and bombs in action films and video games. Yet here on the news, they seem strangely out of place. You could argue that Al-Jazeera uses images of civilian violence to foment public outrage against Israel. This might well be true. At the same time, these images acknowledge human suffering and civilian death and stand strongly against them – and in doing so, foment outrage against war itself.

The complete essay is well-worth reading.

Worth watching is Al Jazeera’s “Saving Soweto”, a superb report detailing the heroic work of Christian and Jewish medical men in ministering to the multitudes. What would South Africa do without such people?! (Scroll down to “DESPERATELY SEEKING BOLLYWOOD’S BRANGELINA”)